Regenerative agriculture in the UK: Stakeholder perspectives and tensions around livestock's role in sustainable land management

Regenerative agriculture (RA) has been promoted as a transformative approach to sustainable land management, even as its meaning remains fluid, with livestock integration often considered as a central principle. Drawing on interviews with UK food system stakeholders, we apply a critical discourse analysis, revealing how livestock functions as a key organising reference point in the RA discourse, through three dominant, partially overlapping narratives of livestock's function: as labourers, landscape managers, and food security stewards. These narratives frame grazing livestock as central to land regeneration and as addressing environmental degradation, supporting rural economic resilience, and contributing to the production of all food. While conveying a strong sense of rural empowerment and offering farmers a form of moral and practical agency in navigating policy, market, and climate uncertainties, this discourse simultaneously works through and rearticulates long-standing hierarchies in land-use priorities, market relations and agricultural subsidy structures. At a time when climate and ecological debates increasingly foreground the need for land-use change, our analysis highlights how RA discourse gives relatively limited consideration to questions of livestock scale, despite livestock occupying a dominant proportion of UK agricultural land. In positioning livestock integration as an assumed component of regeneration, the discourse risks narrowing the scope for imagining more plural and differentiated transformative pathways, including approaches aligned with livestock reduction and stockfree regenerative systems.